Making the case for the right to life of every innocent, from Lake County, Illinois

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Abortion Clinic Workers

Clinic workers avoid the word ‘baby’ but can’t hide the truth

By Sarah TerzoClinic
workers often avoid using the word “baby” at all cost when talking to
abortion patients. Yet even though they try to hide the baby’s humanity,
many women come to realize, sometimes years later, that their abortions
killed their babies.
Norma Goldberger was director of Open Door, a counseling and referral
center for women seeking abortions. When hiring, she carefully selected
staff members who would be “pro-choice.”
One thing they had to understand was that they were not to use the word “baby” under any circumstances.

I confirmed that each counselor
was pro-choice… I did not allow anybody to work with our clients who
referred to a fetus as anything but in that neutral term [ the word
‘fetus’]. I recall arguing with an applicant who couldn’t understand
that the term “baby” was not neutral and a value judgment in and of
itself.

It was easier for a woman to have an abortion if her baby was dehumanized.
Norma Goldberger went on to own and run her own abortion clinic
where, presumably, women were never told they were carrying a “baby.”
Reluctance to use the word “baby” in the abortion business is
widespread. At a convention of abortion providers, one of the speakers, a
nurse at an abortion clinic, said:

These may seem very, very
insignificant to us, but to the patient it can really imply that you are
using a judgment, and quite often we are not aware of what we are
saying. We have to be very, very sensitive, and very, very aware of what
words we’re using to describe the procedures used. Use the word
“fetus”; This is a fetus; this is not a “baby.”

Again we see clinic workers saying that using the word “baby” is
judgmental. In fact saying “baby” might make a woman think twice about
her decision.
Carole Joffe wrote a book after interviewing abortion clinic workers. Author Wendy Simonds quotes her [1] :

In Carole Joffe’s ethnographic
work at an abortion clinic that performed first-trimester abortions, she
found out, “the most interesting problem was how to refer to the
product of the abortion. Although it was acknowledged that many clients
would refer to this as “baby,” or “the pregnancy,” new counselors were,
not surprisingly, urged not to use these charged terms, but instead to
use the more neutral, though admittedly more awkward, ‘products of
conception’ or ‘tissue.’

Simonds also wrote a book about abortion . She observed abortions at a clinic and interviewed clinic workers. She says:
Center staff members commonly said [2]

“the pregnancy,” “the tissue,”
“the products of conception.” “Fetal tissue” was the most explicit term I
heard health workers use with clients.

Saying “fetus” or “tissue” instead of “baby” insulates a woman from
the fact that she is killing her child. In a sense, it “protects” the
woman from the truth. But how long does this “protection” last?
Not too long, according to this social worker from Portland, Oregon, who works at a counseling and referral center:

Most women when they have an
abortion don’t really know what they are doing – they are either so
young, so ignorant, or so frightened… Down the line, 5, 6, or 7 years
when they have children, some kind of trauma almost always comes up… And
down the line, most women do think of the aborted fetus as a living
being, as a baby.

In a survey done by The Center for Bioethical Reform, postabortion
women were asked how they viewed their preborn baby at the time of their
abortion and then later. Here are the results:What was your opinion about the nature of the fetus before your abortion?
Human (26%)
Non-human (30%)
Other (40%)
No answer (4%)What is your opinion about the nature of the fetus after your abortion?
Human (97%)
Non-human (0%)
Other (0%)
No answer (3%)
As you can see, as time went on, nearly all of the women came to
realize they had aborted a baby. Denial, even when aided and abetted by
clinic workers, doesn’t last forever.
There is no doubt that many of these women suffered emotionally when
they came to believe they’d killed their babies. Surely, sugar coating
abortion by avoiding the word “baby” doesn’t help women in the long run.

But if clinic workers referred to the fetus as a “baby” how many
women would have abortions? Some no doubt would still abort, but using
such honest language would most likely make some think twice. No matter
what these clinic workers say about “judgment” and “neutrality,” the
truth is that abortion clinics do not make money on women who choose to
have their babies.
There is great financial incentive to have women go through with
their abortions, and one wonders if that is the real reason the word
“baby” is never used in abortion clinics.
[1] Wendy Simonds. Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a
Feminist Clinic Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ) 1996 p 80.